RPA-Driven Transformation in UK Manufacturing and Supply Chain

UK manufacturing and supply chain businesses are confronted with various economic and social challenges. These challenges include a lack of skilled laborers, limited workflow capacity, high operational costs, unforeseen fluctuations in raw material supply, and a lack of digital awareness.

Furthermore, Brexit burdens the sector with a volatile economy, complicated regulations, and trade barriers. This sabotages the UK businesses’ growth opportunities and progress, impacting global competitiveness and economic loss.

Businesses in the manufacturing and supply chain sector across the UK need a strategic shift to overcome the hurdles. This is where Robotic Process Automation (RPA) steps in.

Incorporating RPA in the UK manufacturing sector can streamline operations with task automation, enhance compliance, and fuel process efficiency while ensuring data accuracy. It helps the teams to prioritize more complex tasks, engage in strategic initiatives, and facilitate innovation.

Read the blog to discover why RPA is essential for your manufacturing and supply chain businesses in the UK, how to achieve RPA-driven transformation in manufacturing, and how to drive digital transformation.

Employing RPA in UK manufacturing and supply chains can yield multiple benefits. However, lack of sufficient awareness and understanding, along with the impending costs, leads to reluctance to adopt RPA.

Manufacturing businesses are increasingly adopting RPA, yet many are still skeptical about its potential. More manufacturing organizations in the UK are willing to embrace RPA but stop short due to a dearth of in-house expertise and financial instability.

Here is a list of some of the key reasons RPA in UK manufacturing is critical for businesses to thrive:

• Boosts Operational Efficiency and Cost Optimization: RPA empowers businesses to automate routine tasks, helping teams to focus more on value-driven core activities. It streamlines tasks such as inventory management, tracking and processing orders, and delivery. Furthermore, RPA in UK manufacturing cuts costs by reducing error-prone data and avoiding costly mistakes.
• Addresses Labor Shortages and skills Gap: A study shows that 80% of manufacturers admit it is difficult to develop digital skills, with 75% of them highlighting that the skills gap is a critical growth barrier. RPA in UK manufacturing can effectively resolve this problem. For instance, RPA software bots can automate data entry and recording activities such as Purchase Orders (PO) and Bills of Materials (BOM). It streamlines invoice processing by extracting relevant data and matching it with processing payments and purchase orders.
• Streamlines Post-Brexit Business Compliance: Post-Brexit has further complicated business compliance and custom regulations. Documentation is fraught with financial vulnerabilities. RPA in UK manufacturing and supply chains eases this business pain. RPA bots, for instance, can help in conducting rules-based digital tasks such as customs documentation (e.g., VAT, customs documentation, and tariffs) and cross-reference data checks between ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and CDS (Customs Declaration Service)
• Digital Transformation: Businesses adopting RPA in UK manufacturing can successfully overcome operational delays and incurred costs. It can help businesses quickly identify process bottlenecks and execute predictive maintenance. This empowers businesses to quickly respond to potential anomalies and avoid costly operational downtime.

RPA in UK manufacturing can help businesses in streamlining and automating repetitive tasks that are time-intensive and error-prone.

Some of the areas where RPA automation can accelerate operational efficiency and productivity include:

1. Order Processing: For many manufacturing enterprises, managing and processing orders involves many PDFs, emails, spreadsheets, and manual data processing. This often creates data discrepancies, resulting in delays and complications. RPA in UK manufacturing enables process automation, ensuring product and consumer data matching and validation. Fewer data errors mean faster order fulfillment. It helps manufacturers to fulfill urgent order processing on time. Evoke, for instance, helped a leading manufacturer accelerate the process of creating sales orders with smart RPA automation. The company successfully processed 20,000+ sales orders annually and reduced data errors by 40% and processing time by 70%.
2. Inventory Management: Tracking inventory data can be overwhelming. Data can be complicated. Especially when it is lying across different systems such as production logs, ERP systems, warehouse management systems (WMS), and inventory management systems (IMS). This often risks outdated stock and mismatched data. RPA automation resolves the issue with data syncing capabilities across systems. It extracts data from diverse sources such as ERP software, point-of-sale (POS) systems, stock availability, and movements across warehouses. Businesses can use RPA automation to actively monitor inventory status, including deadstock. This helps in evaluating customer purchase patterns, tracking in-demand products, and thereby enhancing predictive inventory management.
3. Production Scheduling: Determining a due production schedule can be difficult due to multifarious factors—labor resources, materials availability, equipment capacity, demand forecasting, and costs. RPA bots help collect real-time data from all systems and empower businesses to create effective production schedules. For instance, it can predict demand forecasts based on historical sales and customer data. It can help identify optimal and cost-effective routes for faster shipping.
4. Documentation and Compliance: The complexity of documentation and compliance has doubled post-Brexit for UK manufacturers. Embracing RPA in UK manufacturing can significantly help in mitigating this ordeal. Ensuring data accuracy streamlines activities such as product code verification, creating customer forms, and compliance documents. Moreover, businesses can leverage RPA to scale up and down depending on the volume and velocity of tasks.
5. Vendor Management: Vendor management is crucial for a seamless procurement process. However, this requires proper vendor selection, communication with the vendors, and a systematic onboarding process. RPA-powered vendor management automation can help manufacturers to streamline the process end-to-end. It automates and speeds up routine activities such as vendor onboarding and invoice approvals. It further helps in complying with regulations and compliance, tracking records, data flow, and security. RPA in UK manufacturing empowers businesses to have real-time visibility of vendor information. You can determine potential issues and risks of partnering with a vendor based on historical and current portfolios.
6. Quality Control Reporting: Quality assurance in manufacturing and the supply chain is non-negotiable. RPA in UK manufacturing can significantly simplify this process. Tools such as Microsoft Power Automate, UiPath, and Automation Anywhere can collect data from diverse systems, data logs, spreadsheets, and IoT devices. This functionality powers the system to automatically trigger real-time alert notifications based on quality metric deviations, delivering actionable quality reports.

Here is a list of steps to initiate successful RPA automation implementation:

• Identify routine and high-volume processes
• Incorporate initial RPA automation in low-impact tasks to avoid disruption and operational downtime
• Choose the right set of tools (Blue Prism, Zendesk, UiPath, Automation Anywhere)
• Create a clear roadmap aligned with business goals
• Consider gradual adoption and provide employee training

Embracing RPA in manufacturing and supply chains can help businesses with repetitive operational bottlenecks. However, a clear business-oriented strategy, along with the right set of tools, is essential to realize its value.

Partnering with a reliable service provider, such as Evoke Technologies, can help you effectively leverage RPA automation and drive business productivity. Equipped with decades of expertise, rich digital infrastructure, and outcome-driven methodologies, Evoke’s team of RPA experts can help you in prioritizing processes requiring RPA automation, encompassing business goals and efficiency across the UK.

Connect with us to know more.